The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. In order to provide easier or faster information transfer and convenience, telecommunication industry service providers are developing improvements to existing networks. In this regard, wireless communication has become increasingly popular in recent years due, at least in part, to reductions in size and cost along with improvements in battery life and computing capacity of mobile electronic devices. As such, mobile electronic devices have become more capable, easier to use, and cheaper to obtain. Due to the now ubiquitous nature of mobile electronic devices, people of all ages and education levels are utilizing mobile terminals to communicate with other individuals or contacts, receive services and/or share information, media and other content.
Communication networks and technologies have been developed and expanded to provide robust support for mobile electronic devices. In this regard, telecommunications technologies aimed at providing wireless data over long distances in a variety of ways, from point-to-point links to full mobile cellular type access are being developed and enhanced. Improvements to the global system for mobile communication (GSM) and the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) along with developments related to the evolved UMTS terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) are also currently being pursued. The E-UTRAN, which is also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) or 3.9G, is aimed at upgrading prior technologies by improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and providing better integration with other open standards.
In a typical network configuration mobile users communicate with each other via communication links maintained by the network. In this regard, for example, an originating station may typically communicate data to network devices in order for the network devices to relay the data to a target station. Recently, efforts have been made to provide for device to device (D2D) communication. More particularly, device to device communication may be an important aspect in relation to offloading traffic from an access point and/or improving energy efficiency over only communication through the access point.
Given the recent advances and continued desire for improved communication capabilities, it may be desirable to provide further functionality in relation to the provision of device to device communication.